4 Good Excuses To Change Hotel Rooms
Booking a room is an important part of planning a trip. Whether they be for business, pleasure, or any reason you might want to get away. Unfortunately, not all who stay in a hotel, motel, Airbnb, or other type of accommodation have a good experience.
Deaths in hotel rooms happen more than many people expect, either from natural causes or something worse. If the scene is properly cleaned and tended to, that should be the end of the story, but when institutions cut corners it opens up dangers that all travelers should be aware of.
Let’s take a look at the four main warning signs you need to change your room while on your trip. Being an aware and alert traveler will help identify potentially dangerous conditions you may have not known about.
1. Dirty Room
Hair, black specks, or odd stains are signs of an unclean room.
The first and most obvious sign your room isn’t fit for staying is if it’s visibly dirty. If you find blood, dirt, garbage, or any other biohazard, change rooms. If something in the room looks like it shouldn’t be there, talk to the front desk, or in case of a hostel or Airbnb, customer service.
While some of this could be a result of an oversight during cleaning, it could also be signs of the hotel staff attempting to clean a biohazard or other contamination that they weren’t prepared for. In cases like this, it’s best to check for stains on sheets or the mattress itself. Look to see that there are no small specks, dirt, red spots (usually blood or blood splatters), or dried stains. A clean pair of sheets or a clean mattress should look brand new, or at the very least, sanitary.
Things like blood is hard to clean if you don’t know what you’re doing, so it’s not uncommon for there to be light brown stains that look like dried up blood. You’ll be able to tell the difference between blood and make up by the way it dried.
2. Bad Smells
Trust your nose. If your room smells bad, there’s reason to be concerned.
If something smells rotten, that’s usually evidence of rot. This seems like a simple fact, but plenty of people will dismiss an odd smell in their room unless pushed to do something about it. For the most part, smells don’t just magically appear in a hotel room; something has to be causing it.
In the worst case scenario, this would be the remnants of something hazardous that makes the dwelling unsafe to live in. Like before, lingering smells could be a sign of improper cleanup at a crime scene, potentially even decomposing flesh, or even a poisonous gas problem.
Be cautious of Airbnbs that nearly choke you with an overbearing air freshener or other scent. This could be a way to cover something up rather than just a poor choice of decoration.
3. Unsafe Safety
You should feel safe when you’re in your room at the end of a long day, but this can’t happen if the room itself doesn’t seem secure against intruders. Something like a door lock that doesn’t lock properly is obvious, but windows that don’t close properly are also a major issue. These sorts of serious security issues aren’t the result of wear and tear but evidence that someone has broken in before. If these problems haven’t been fixed, there’s a much greater possibility that it could happen again while you’re in there.
4. Infestations
It’s somewhat obvious that a room full of roaches, flies, rats, or other pests wouldn’t be somewhere you want to stay. Overall, a room with signs of an infestation should make you question the cleanliness standards of the entire place you’re staying, as it’s a major sign of a lack of care in cleaning.
Look for signs of bed bugs on the bedding, and look for signs of roaches along the walls, bathroom, and dark places like the dresser. These pests tend to hide, but if you dig a little deeper you might be able to find evidence of an infestation.
Even beyond the potential for an improper crime scene cleanup, these pests and the diseases they carry pose a health hazard all on their own. Check out of that room and potentially the whole building if you can.
Finding a place to stay that’s clean and safe is integral to travel, but there are many things that can go wrong while searching for somewhere to sleep. Keep these four signs in mind when you first enter a room to evaluate if it’s somewhere you really want to stay. You’ll thank us later.
If this article has helped you, please consider sharing it with a link back to Crime Scene Clean Up.
